Rochdale remembers Holodomor victims 85 years on

The 85th anniversary of the Ukrainian Holodomor famine was recognised on Saturday (24 November) with a service at the Rochdale Memorial Gardens.

The Holodomor was an artificial famine between 1932 and 1933, which saw approximately seven to ten million innocent men, women and children brutally starved to death by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, in an attempt to force the Ukrainians to adopt their ways.

Ukraine - the bread basket of Europe - was turned into a mass graveyard, with whole villages wiped out from starvation.

Adults and children were dying from starvation in the streets of towns and cities: at the height of the enforced famine, 17 people died every minute, with 25,000 people dying each day.

Worldwide, the Ukrainian population commemorates the horrific tragedy each year on the fourth Saturday in November.

The service, which is held every year in Rochdale, commemorates all who were barbarically and systematically starved to death in the enforced famine.

A one-minute silence was observed at the Holodomor Memorial Stone, following a procession from the Town Hall to the Memorial Gardens plus opening speeches.

Wreaths were laid by the Mayor Mohammed Zaman, MP Tony Lloyd, and members of the Rochdale Ukrainian Community.

A Memorial Service at St Chad’s Church was led by Reverend Mark Coleman, Vicar of Rochdale, and Reverend Bohdan Lysykanych of the Ukrainian Catholic Church in Rochdale.

For many years, the truth about Holodomor has been denied, but archive documents now uncovered in Ukraine show that Stalin deliberately targeted Ukraine for the harshest treatment, in the full knowledge that millions were starving and dying.

At the time, two British journalists, Malcolm Muggeridge and Gareth Jones, witnessed and wrote about the famine. Jones had kept diaries of the man-made starvation, which were published in March 1933 after leaving the country.

He was later shot dead in Manchukuo, on the eve of his 30th birthday, after being captured by bandits. There were strong suspicions Jones was murdered as ‘revenge’ for his publications, which did not look favourably upon the Soviets.

Foreign and Commonwealth Office archives also show that the UK Government was fully aware of the famine, the scale of deaths and the fact that it had been created deliberately, but chose, for political reasons, to remain silent.

Many documents and eyewitness accounts exist verifying the cold facts of genocide, defined by Article II of the UN Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide 1948 as: “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethical, racial or religious group including deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”

On any objective view of the evidence, the Holodomor was genocide, recognised as such by Ukraine, America, Canada, Australia, Poland and many other nations.

Rochdale was the first town in the UK, not only to honour the victims with a memorial stone, but to also recognise the Holodomor as genocide - a motion yet to be acknowledged and followed by the UK government.

• www.rochdaleonline.co.uk/news-features/2/news-headlines/32806/rochdale-unveils-memorial-for-forgotten-victims-of-holodomor

The millions of innocent victims who were starved to death just for being Ukrainian deserve to be remembered and to be given the justice of their rightful place in mainstream 20th century history.